Network attached storage (NAS) devices may comprise a wide variety of bays for their storage devices. However, as the number of drives increases, the NAS device typically requires more powerful processors and a different motherboard, redundant array of independent disks (RAID), and power and enclosure management architectures to support the different number of drives. This makes the hardware and software development and cost of the different NAS products difficult to manage.
NAS systems typically use I2C port expanders, which have limited addressing capabilities, to detect/control a fixed numbers of drives. Such I2C port expanders are only extensible by adding another port expander at another I2C address. These enclosure management topologies, however, use all of the limited I2C addressing space and can only control a limited number of drives. Unfortunately, when using a port expander, the software and control system must be modified or configured differently to address the devices. This makes both hardware and software design more complicated and costly.